*** SLOW SPEED CW - SLOW SPEED CW - SLOW SPEED CW - SLOW SPEED CW
EX: wt6k send CQ and ae6yn join in Editors note: depending on propagation conditions and antenna position, you may have trouble hearing them. *** A Letter from Norway
July 12, 2009:
Hi all
Just finished dinner as you all finished breakfast. Crossed the Arctic
circle line about 0200 this morning. It was full daylight at
that time.
Had an all day tour of the
Trondheim area yesterday. It is an area where a farm consist of
more than 10 acres. Most of the farms at other locations are very small
due to the mountains. This country is all hard rock except for small
areas of a few acres. There is a lot of Barley grown in this area for
beer and food. It is still very green. Harvest is in late August or
September. Have toured a number of
Fjords on this huge ship. They are 1200 to 1500 feet deep and up
to 200 miles long. At the end they are large enough to turn this 900
foot long ship around with room to spare.
This
floating city is over 900 ft. long, 180 feet wide and contains
3100 passengers and 1200 staff. Signed up for a tour of the bridge,
engine control room and other areas but they canceled it due to a
lack of interest.
Only five people signed up.
Well when we came into the
Internet cafe it was empty. It is now full. 26 positions.
I will send you another up-date in a day or two. Oh yea, this is the
first day without at least some rain, never heavy and we have sun which
we have not had. Of course today is a sea day so is not important.
R & M
July 15, 2009
Monday we were at Honningsvag. Ship was too big to dock so had
to take the Life boats in to the dock. Town has 3500
residents. It is a large fishing port. lots of fish due to the
warm currents. The ocean does not ice over here due to the warm
water.
Took an 18 mile bus ride to North Cape. 74 deg, 10 min 21
seconds north. Can not go any further as it is the Arctic
ocean. 700 KM to the North Pole. We had the pleasure of being
there on the warmest day of the year so far. Clear and warm, no
wind 75 deg. The locals said that within two days it will be
in the 30's again.
Yesterday we were at Tromso. 60,000 residents. Has a major
hospital and medical research facility. Great Arctic Museum.
It is on one of many islands in the area. They have both
tunnels and bridges between them. Took a tram ride to the top
of a mountain overlooking the area. As it is dark for so long,
four months, that the ski areas are light for the season so you
can ski 24 hours a day in the dark.
I hope the post cards from North Cape are postmarked from there
and not somewhere else as the post office was closed. There
were 10 mail boxes there and they were all full and running
over. The Post Offices are "open most days of the week" The
same was true in Honningsvag.
Further details on the ship.
gross tons 112,894
net tons 85,676
Fuel 701,983 gallons
Water 722,399 gallons
Speed 25.87 MPH
R & M
*** NARCC update. Something new besides PAVEPAWS. We consider respacing channels on 2 meters to provide room for digital radio systems. As ORGREP of the W6CO system, I attended the meeting and these are my impressions. *** The Updated Net Roster is now available from the "Links" page. Net Controllers: You can print it out as an HTML file or Adobe PDF file. You must have an Adobe Acrobat Reader installed to do the latter. Please note a couple of recent callsign changes. *** Congratulations to Nina KI6NGR, Greg KI6JTR and Bradley K62B. Born on the Fourth of July! ***
Field Day is over for another year and once again it was good.
Propagation was somewhat improved over last year as N6APA reported he made quite
a few contacts on 15 meters. This is a real improvement over last years
numbers. 40 meters wasn't great but there were a lot of signals on the
band and the rapid QSB from the previous few years was not as noticeable.
QSB (rapid fading) can be a killer on CW. Once again SARS thanks our hosts
at the Napa Valley Memorial Gardens for providing a very comfortable place to
operate.
June 18, 2009 From Barry Martin's Napa newsletter: A new service is available for advising citizens of emergency situations. These can range from traffic advisories, wildland fires, or other casualty information. Take a look at: http://local.nixle.com/city/ca/napa/ Pay attention to the date of the posting; for some reason they keep old information for quite awhile. *** Dstar tidbit: (Or should that be tid-byte?) Anyone using a repeater for any length of time knows the term "Full quieting". What the term is supposed to mean but doesn't always, is that your signal is strong enough into the repeater's receiver system that there is no white noise accompanying your audio. Sometimes if you like driving with the window open you might have a "full quieting" signal and still be noisy. So along comes D-Star and we are still hearing the term "full quieting". The problem with that is you can have a really marginal signal all full of bloops and bleeps and there still won't be any "noise" as we know it. The term just doesn't apply to digital modulation schemes.
A new term has been coined and it sounds good to me: "Full Sync" or Fully
synchronized" means no bloops bleeps or R2D2. By the way, if someone wants an S-meter report on a repeater he should pull out the Technician study guide and do a refresher. If you are looking at an S-meter while listening to a repeater, that tells you how strong the repeater transmitter is into your station. It has absolutely no bearing on the transmitting station's signal strength or quality. *** From July QST On Wednesday, April 29, 2009 Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) introduced HR 2160, the Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Enhancement Act of 2009, in the US House of Representatives. This bill, if passed, would “promote and encourage the valuable public service, disaster relief, and emergency communications provided on a volunteer basis by licensees of the Federal Communications Commission in the Amateur Radio Service, by undertaking a study of the uses of Amateur Radio for emergency and disaster relief communications, by identifying unnecessary or unreasonable impediments to the deployment of Amateur Radio emergency and disaster relief communications, and by making recommendations for relief of such unreasonable restrictions so as to expand the uses of Amateur Radio communications in Homeland Security planning and response.” The bill has been referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The bill currently has five co-sponsors: Madeleine Bordallo (Guam), Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS). Representative Thompson serves as Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security. Representatives Jackson-Lee, Lofgren and Kilroy are members of that committee. “We understand that Representative Jackson-Lee was very impressed with the radio amateurs she encountered on a visit to an Emergency Operations Center in Houston during Hurricane Ike last September,” said ARRL Chief Executive Officer David Sumner, K1ZZ. “We are grateful to her and to the five original co-sponsors for their support of Amateur Radio and the encouragement that their bill offers.” ARRL President Joel Harrison, W5ZN, concurred: “We are excited to have Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee introduce HR 2160. It is extremely encouraging to have the support of a number of original co-sponsors -- including several members of the House Homeland Security Committee -- who recognize the importance of Amateur Radio’s long history of public service. Once the text of the bill is available we will be asking ARRL members to seek co-sponsorship and support from their own representatives.” If enacted into law, H.R. 2160 - the Amateur Radio Emergency Communications
Enhancement Act of 2009 - would instruct the Secretary of Homeland Security to
undertake a study, and report its findings to Congress within 180 days, on the
uses and capabilities of Amateur The study shall:
*** June 14, 2009. This sent by Peter, AA6AV A most interesting link showing all the Hams in Napa. Wow, I didn't know there where half that many! It's not clear where the data comes from because there are some dates not normally found on a simple ULS search. Many, many silent keys included in the data as well as the original calls of folks who have long held vanity calls. Very interesting. http://www.city-data.com/aradio/lic-Napa-California.html If you want some city other than Napa you can go to your browser's address bar and just change "Napa" to that other city. A more accurate way is to go to the City-Data.com home page and search using their links. Each city listed has pages of interesting facts concerning the locale. The link to the amateur radio data base is way down near the bottom after the section listing the FCC data such as cell phone towers. Thanks, Peter. *** June 2, 2009 From Mark Evans, KE6O D.E.C.
We had good turn out at the A.R.E.S. meeting at the
Napa Valley Unified School District (N.V.U.S.D.)
Emergency Operation Center
(E.O.C.) on 5/5/09. Nick Curtis, KI6VWR,
gave us an overview of how their operation is set up under ideal conditions.
The room that the hams would setup in is adjacent to the main E.O.C. which is
the School Board room in the old Napa High School building. The communications
room has plenty of tables and chairs and antenna feed line entry's (windows that
open) to a lawn area that would work well for setting up temporary antennas. As
far as the mission goes, It could be as easy as one ham at the E.O.C.
communicating with the county E.O.C. or needing a ham at each of the N.V.U.S.D.
locations or ?????. Keeping in mind that on any given school day the N.V.U.S.D.
has as many as 2000 faculty and staff and 17,000 students at 35 different
locations. The possible scenarios are daunting. *** From the May 29 ARRL letter: Food for Thought! RACES Cross said that he has been getting questions concerning RACES <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RACES>, asking what plans the FCC has to rejuvenate the organization. "The questions have been from a couple of FEMA guys who also happen to be hams," he said. "Now, in RACES, stations are certified by a civil defense organization and persons who hold an FCC-issued Amateur Radio operators license are certified by that civil defense organization as enrolled in it. I know that the term 'civil defense organization' is way out-of-date -- 'emergency management agencies' is probably a more current term. But the terminology used in the rules reflects that RACES was created in the Cold War era when there was a concern that everyone would be ordered off the air." Cross pointed out that RACES "seems to be used for local, state and regional events and it is administered by FEMA. The rules require that communications transmitted in RACES be approved by the organization that certified people and that they're enrolled with. Fundamentally, RACES is there to serve whatever purpose that the emergency management agency has for it. Because the emergency management agency decides whether it has a use for a RACES group, the rejuvenation, if it is even necessary, will have to come from the local or state organizations. They will have to get people interested in joining their groups if they have a use for them. Some of the people I have talked to in different government agencies wonder why we still have this service, given the way that emergency communications are run and managed today." (ed. Bill Cross, W3TN, is a staff member in the FCC's Mobility Division. Clearly, we, the Amateur Community, can't wait for "Emergency Management Agencies" whatever they are, to come to us. They rarely have in the past and when they did the relationship was superficial and brief. It is incumbent upon us, as interested parties, to organize ourselves and be ready to pitch in when needed. This is how it has always been and perhaps should always be.) ARES signups are now in progress. Mark Evans, KE6O is compiling a list of Napa County Amateurs who can be counted on to provide help in an emergency. If that's you, please sign up using this link. ARES Registration
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